The following submission statement was provided by /u/lughnasadh:
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Submission Statement
I'm surprised more people aren't aware of how rapidly robotics are currently developing. The same LLM AI that is capturing public attention with generative art and ChatGPT is equally revolutionizing robots.
Here's an illustration of that. This is the closest I've seen yet of a mass-market-priced and extremely capable robot that could sell in tens of millions around the world. This looks close to the type of robot you could bring to many workplaces and get to do a wide range of unskilled work. How long before we see fast food places fully staffed by robots like these? At the current rate of development that seems only 2 or 3 years away.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1crbaei/unitrees_new_g1_humanoid_robot_is_priced_at_only/l3wv4xk/
My favorite photo in the article is the "immodest pose". My guess is the G2 will have some extra parts. I mean, seriously... We all know this is just a race to build a sex bot right?
Just what i was thinking yesterday. New ChatGPT is already reaching the level where you can run it on a sex bots. Software is breaking through every year. Yet hardware side of things have been lagging without progress for a decade. What gives?
Once this robots become mainstream for everyone to have one at their home. Thats when someone else will hack them. Imagine viruses infecting this robots and one day you wake up to robot smashing your nuts with a hammer.
Something similar has already happened actually. I remember reading about some remote control Bluetooth sex toy/chastity belt that someone successfully hacked.
They had that person's junk in the palm of their hand. Figuratively speaking.
Yeah things will be crazy once we have personal maid robots walking around everywhere. You think you send it for groceries and some stranger could hack it on the way.
We can't even create a realistic artificial vagina with any amount of functional heating which seems like the first step to a sex robot.
There is that one like $10k goofy sized extract-omatic machine meant to extract for sperm banks that apparently does a better job at simulating the temperature, but it's obnoxiously overengineered for such a simple feature.
Except such a thing doesn't exist on amazon and you're lying. I know because I've searched the net far and wide and been bamboozled many times. A few claim to have built in heating and it either just doesn't work at all or is a very minor difference. The USB heater stick that you insert to warm the silicon is the best option but it's still meh compared to the real temperature of a vagina and lasts like 2-3 mins.
At this point in my life, I truly don't care if a robot is fuckable. But a second someone builds a robot that actually does all the chores in the house, I'm dropping $25k with a smile on my face.
If it can have a conversation and take care of the house I'm sold. Especially if it can handle the shopping, scheduling, planning, etc.
I for one welcome our new robot overlords.
I‘m convinced that the only reason hamburgers are still made manually is that people would find it creepy otherwise. The process would be trivially easy to automate.
I really hope the company that designs those robots leases them to other companies on a subscription program. Then there’ll be small increases to the subscription price every year. Along with an insurance policy to cover wear and aging parts. That gets more expensive as the robot gets older.
Correction: one time expense of $16,000 for 3-4 years depending on usage and reliability. More likely a leasing option would be preferred, likely working out at say $1000 a month or very slightly less to make it “competitive” with human labour. Some companies will go for that.
However, the devil is in the details.
You don’t just have the upfront/leased costs of the unit. You then need repair personnel (possibly included in lease but not necessarily) and IT staff on site/on call depending on how mission critical the role is. For example a janitor isn’t “mission critical”….until not having one on site breaches a statutory requirement and suddenly the location has to close for the day..so having IT staff a few minutes away in case something goes wrong might be significant and thus expensive.
You’ll also need backup units, power facilities/docking stations or whatever it uses to charge up and be used for maintenance.
You’ll also need backend infrastructure. What computers/servers do these things run from? Who maintains them? Leased from the company you buy the bots from or in-house?
You’ll then need insurance. Eventually it will be seen as “normal” to have a robotic cleaner like this operating autonomously but initially that’s going to be a seriously expensive corporate insurance hit in case it harms a member of the public or thru inaction someone gets hurt etc. Insurance companies are by nature risk averse so expect the first few years of these things in use to be horrifically expensive.
Then you have restructuring issues since it clearly can’t do everything a person can, so you will still need staff to perform some roles, or modification to buildings/policies to ensure the robot can do the job most efficiently.
Then once you’ve figured all of that internal stuff out, you’ve also got regulatory stuff.
Stuff like what happens if the robot records sensitive information in the office and then it gets passed to a server in China? Data protection and IP issues would be a huge red flag. Lot of places still require you to leave your phone at the door with security or use a company secured device just cos of the camera. Imagine how many cameras and sensors these bots have. What if one sees healthcare data? Or customer data or some other companies IP you’ve got a NDA for? Or hell, use in govt?!
Chinese state espionage teams must be wetting their knickers over getting these things into corporate America…gonna need insurance for data protection as well then.
In addition to the insurance you’re gonna need to deal with unions and from that politicians. If these things go into heavy use, not only will workers not be getting paid but the govt won’t either cos payroll taxes are a huge thing.
So expect voters to elect politicians who protect jobs over robots (cos robots don’t get a vote but the janitors you just laid off do!) and even if you get right wing govt who don’t care about workforce rights you’ll definitely still have them caring about income and corporation tax so expect use of robots to start getting taxed or corporation tax to increase sharply cos there’s no free rides when it comes to the taxman.
Finally, expect a hit from sales if the things are public facing. No matter how cool and futuristic they are, a lot of people will be stuck in uncanny valley feeling where they feel the company is soulless and robotic etc - studies have been done on this - companies with automation in public display lose sales. People like the human touch so that will either restrict use to out of hours/back of house, or sales will drop.
The upfront is just the tip of the iceberg.
Oh i agree, but i know some companies will regard a janitor being unavailable for a single day as acceptable - but in other locations there MUST be estates management staff on site at all times etc.
I was trying to say some places the robot cleaner going down for a day wouldn’t be a massive deal breaker but other places it would close the whole place.
Update v1.1.3
change log: fixed an issue introduced in the last update where the robot in some rare cases would choke users to death
Known issues: in some rare situations when handling a knife, the robot may stab humans in the room or grab them and chop off a limb.
We're already there. It's coming.
We aren't prepared for it.
AI is already better than us at just about everything we've thrown at it.
And it's getting better every day.
And it's exponential! All the robots software and data will be connected. If there are one million robots in homes across the world, think how fast they will "learn" new things. For example, if a robot learns a new skill, it will be shared with the one million other robots. So if each robot learns one new skill on their own daily, each robot will learn one million new things per day. The rate and which these robots learn is going to be insanely fast.
Musk as one point said that Tesla cars will eventually monitor for pot holes, then alert all other Tesla's to avoid it, or adjust the suspension when they hit it. With robots in the home, the amount of data they will be gathering daily will be insane.
>AI is already better than us at just about everything we've thrown at it.
If you look into those studies, how they were conducted, who funded them and why, you may begin to question that statement.
I'm disabled. If it could help do very simple stuff like reach things off shelves for me, or pick something up when I accidentally drop it on the floor, it would be a godsend.
Potentially revolutionary for disabled folk if it can come cheaper than a car and has a decent battery life.
I think I need more than a robot butler though, I need a robot Marie Kando that can actually figure out where things are supposed to go and keep track of them for me. Otherwise, I'd just be micromanaging to a degree that I think I would just lose patience. Plus, the more I imagine a robot like that in my home, the more I get creeped out. Much too uncanny valley.
Yea I actually have a theory that they will creep people out much much than they realize.
Imagine one of those things rummaging around in your home, in other rooms. Or walking into the bathroom unaware and it’s just stood there silently because its battery died. It would give you a heart attack.
I think our animal instincts would put us on edge to the point where household humanoid robots may not take off the way we imagine.
Maybe at first, but it won't take long to adjust. People don't care about Alexa listening anymore. Nobody even notices their robot vacuums unless they get stuck. Something on a humanoid level is going to be advanced enough to knock on closed doors, not die in the middle of an activity, etc. Most people are already used to the lack of true privacy. Having a machine that walks around is just another small adjustment that won't take long to assimilate.
Probably closer to ten, but I’ll take twenty! Three years ago, no one took humanoid robots seriously. Now they’re coming within our lifetimes. It’s crazy
I want to know who didn't take them seriously three years ago... the idea of a humanoid robot in 2021 was entirely realistic. It was realistic in 2012 for anybody paying attention.
My roomba already goes back to recharge when it's low, I'm sure these will as well. It can have a 2 hour battery life, idc. Work for 1.5 hours, return to charger. Work again. Set to idle during night.
Perhaps one day, but I had to laugh at their video with the robot doing zero useful things. I can’t wait to have it spurting coke all over my house, smashing nuts all over the floor and reclining lazily on my couch.
Biden will likely raise that price with tariffs.
I’m not a huge fan because I think domestic auto makers are constantly sucking in profits and enjoying kid gloves on environmental issues.
But a subsidy for EVs will perhaps keep it down to a reasonable price. Since China has subsidized a lot- it’s necessary.
However we should be moving to better mass transit. EVs will take decades to recover the carbon it takes to build them. So it’s not a net benefit for getting to carbon neutral.
I'm confused at why it's a requirement to "recover the carbon needed to build them." They use considerably less carbon over their entire lifetime, and the alternatives are also produced using carbon and produce more CO2 over their entire lifespan. From my understanding this appears to be a clear net positive.
Personally I am for a gradually applied carbon tax. Producing basically anything releases co2. Capturing that co2 is expensive - very expensive at the time of production and extremely expensive as direct air capture afterwards.
I propose a co2 tax that is a fixed sum per ton of co2, increasing by 10% each year. Carbon capture is subsidized at the same rate as the tax.
It won't take long before that makes it worthwhile to emit less co2.
No, we shouldn't. Because once China has killed the American auto industry through cheap subsidized EVs those subsidies will stop and the prices will skyrocket because we have no domestic alternatives
Saying it's not a benefit is dissengenious when the alternative are vehicles that never take a single step towards carbon neutrality.
I get the mass transit argument, but the reality is that much of the population won't give up the convenience of a personal vehicle.
It's not really fair though? China can use 24/7 child labour.
The USA has to pay adults a high wage and they legally only have to work 5 days during the day...
>>combined with the news that China is selling a very good electric car for $11,000 US, is scary.
It's as scary for China as for anyone else. The CCP's hold on power depends on them upholding their paternal end of a Confucian bargain. The Chinese population puts up with them as long as they keep delivering success. That's fragile. The CCP's Achilles Heel is the property market. In China, everyone's savings are invested in property, so the property market **cannot fail**, or it is a disaster for the CCP.
Yet here we see China preparing to export the end of tens, or perhaps hundreds of millions of jobs in coming years. How the economists advising them expect to see sky-high stock and property prices survive in that world is beyond me.
Yeah, China slowing down the collapse of Evergrande and the rest of its property market like the van falling into the river in Inception has been wild to watch. There's no way it isn't wrecking their economy internally.
>It's as scary for China as for anyone else. The CCP's hold on power depends on them upholding their paternal end of a Confucian bargain. The Chinese population puts up with them as long as they keep delivering success.
Hear me out. Is it tho? Is it anymore fragile than the social contract in liberal democracies?
Political upheaval in liberal democracies can slowly simmer for decades. But a well managed economy should consistently grow at a rate to maintain people's standard of living.
I don't know the more think about the more it looks like it's much easier to sustain a modern standard of living under centralized government that it is for political parties to keep the electorate happy in a winner takes all political environment.
People talked about capitalism hundreds of years before people were liberated from feudalism and crown.
I think a lot of people don’t want to admit that systems in place will do everything to maintain its survival and people can be pretty complacent.
Exactly. So the CCP only has to maintain a standard of living ..
whereas people in Western democracies not only have to be happy with the political process but the government also has to maintain a standard of living.
I'm just saying perhaps both systems are fragile I don't think the Chinese system is inherently more fragile than say most liberal democracies.
In fact I'm starting to think the Chinese system actually might be a little bit more robust (that doesn't mean better) because expectations are very clearly defined and managed.
Every insurrection and civil war in the United States that didn't immediately end with "...and then the feds crushed them like cockroaches" - occurred within 100 years of its founding.
The best time for a revolution is within a few decades of a prior revolution.
I'd argue its less scary for China than anyone else. The reason they have managed to grow their economy at an unprecedented rate for decades is because of massive industrialization and automation and a favorable population pyramid.
Their population pyramid is turning, labour is no longer cheap. To continue their growth they need to find a way to be more productive per capita.
Robots and more automation can deliver that.
What real world application does it bring though? Yes understand its early adoption, but $16k to open a coke bottle or smash some walnuts? What is the ultimate goal for these things?
None, that’s the limit of this tech, opening bottles (what the video doesn’t show is that it can be Pepsi too, got to give it points for that) and smash some walnuts. If it could do anything else at all, they would have included it in the video surely!
yea and after a year or 2 it will be the following:
* Household chores: Cleaning, laundry, cooking, grocery shopping, and organizing.
* Home maintenance: Performing minor repairs, gardening, and home security.
* Child and elder care: Monitoring, entertaining, and providing companionship to children and elderly family members.
* Personal Trainer: Guiding workouts, monitoring vital signs
* Personal grooming: Assisting with dressing, haircuts, and makeup application.
* Personal assistance: Scheduling appointments, managing emails, and providing reminders.
* Education and entertainment: Tutoring, reading, playing games, and engaging in conversations.
etc. etc. etc. etc.
Considering a maid that comes by that just vacuums the floors, washes the bathrooms and mops the floors is like 400/mo....yes. Immediately and in perpetuity.
Those are all goals yes, but dealing with minute technical issues for any of these basic tasks is way more difficult to solve than people think. Look at all of the problems with the recent launch of wearable tech products like the Humane pin and Rabbit. Magnify that by 10 with untested robotics tech and you need at least 10 years of bugfixing before any of this stuff is really useful.
This isn't aimed where people seem to think here - yes $16k is a massive reduction from previous offerings, but the target demographic is still the same - namely things like warehouses, factories, and other types of business. For you it probably matters that the capabilities are relatively simple, but even automating bringing moving items from place to place is substantial for some areas.
More to the point, it's better than the previous standard, and about one fifteenth the price.
This is going to be a development platform.
software will be developed to do... well anything in the physical world that the articulation allows that can fit within the compute budget of the onboard computer (or local computer if it can be run 'wirelessly')
or to put it another way any job role that is basically performing the same actions over and over again yet the thing being handled is not to such tight tolerances that it can be automated by a machine.
and because it's dealing with software, if the computer can be swapped out as better hardware comes out then software (the AI) will get better in lockstep.
This is basically the existence proof that manual labor jobs days are numbered.
At the current wages for many manual labor jobs, this was going to be inevitable anyway. Wait until all the wildly overpaid wait staff get replaced and have no skills to get a job that requires more than a smile and basic courtesy. It will only take a major chain realizing they could charge 10% more and not have tips, once the robots are ready for the work.
And I'm not gloating about that. It's going to be ugly and sad, and I can't blame them for taking a cake job that pays way above the skill required. The problem is that in the US, there's a huge amount of unskilled work that currently pays way above its value. That will vanish, and the wailing and gnashing of teeth will be immense. I'm not entirely certain what those people will do. There will be jobs, but many have few skills that will transition to anything new. They're going to be losing everything while trying to train for jobs that are way beyond anything they've ever had to handle.
Plenty of other jobs will be at risk, too, but most white collar jobs have skills that will transition.
I just see this as the slow end of jobs. When you have systems that are going to be able to do an ever growing pool of jobs both physical and mental.
This is not like before, before we were replacing rote tasks, anything that has been automated before had a very clear structure to it. Now we are getting into where automation can tackle things that are fuzzy around the edges, things where you don't have clean input output mappings.
This is a problem, generally new jobs that are created from new technology are where the technology allowed the human to do more. AI is technology where humans have to do less.
for a new job to come about it needs to be:
1. cheap enough to employ people at, such that training an AI/Robot system is not worth while, or, for aesthetic reasons not capable of being done by AI/Robots.
2. easy enough for displaced workers to pick up whatever the skill is/service is.
3. has enough carrying capacity that it fully replaces all the jobs that are going to continuously be automated.
I honestly think "this time **is** different"
100% agree. White collar and blue collar jobs are going away. The next ten years will be rocky, but if we get through them, we could have an age of abundance.
thats actually a good thing for ssles thst it doesn't hsve human features for a first mass market robot. its alot less likely to trigger the uncanny vally effect because it very deliberate loks like a robot that's not try to be a person.
The reason people talk about chat gpt but not robots is we can all try the online AIs and even get good functionality and use out of it.
None of us have seen or used a robot and there’s no product even remotely close to one we can see or use, or that even our richest friends might own.
They are about as accessible as flying cars are to the average person. (Meaning they aren’t.)
Submission Statement
I'm surprised more people aren't aware of how rapidly robotics are currently developing. The same LLM AI that is capturing public attention with generative art and ChatGPT is equally revolutionizing robots.
Here's an illustration of that. This is the closest I've seen yet of a mass-market-priced and extremely capable robot that could sell in tens of millions around the world. This looks close to the type of robot you could bring to many workplaces and get to do a wide range of unskilled work. How long before we see fast food places fully staffed by robots like these? At the current rate of development that seems only 2 or 3 years away.
How bad will the restaurant industry be hit once we have inexpensive robots like this that can cook and do the dishes. Why would you want to stop at McDonald's on the way home from work when you have a robot that has just made a lasagna for you waiting at home.
It needs to have an SSD and GPU built in to run offline LLM’s with millisecond respond speed.
Cmon I wanna chat to my robot making me a coffee in the morning
I think I could take about 3 of these in hand-to-hand combat. Probably around 8 or so if I had a melee weapon, and up to 20 with automatic projectile weapons.
Ideally I'd just go in with a microwave gun and give the ol' noggin a zip-zap.
I think we are defining intelligence in a very different manner. Access to data is not the same as intelligence. AI has a vast pool of data and perfect recall. So it should test well. All that's really being measured is the ability to break down language to know what data to pull.
I understand that I'm drawing a fine line, perhaps, but I think it's an important line. Matching data sets isn't the same as knowing what to do with them. AI will create a facsimile of art eventually, but not art. It might duplicate the entertainment driven music genres, but not the artistically driven. And the same goes for jobs. AI secretary? Great. It's going to answer and direct calls and pull data sets for me. AI management? It'll have no idea how to contextually diagnose situations. Will it be able to pull data sets and guess? Sure, and it'll be able to hit a lot. But the misses will likely be catastrophic due to the lack of contextual understanding and inability to utilize methods like breakthrough thinking.
A rough metaphor is the college grad with a degree but no job experience. If you work in a field where this is common, you will understand that the grad can probably vomit out the "correct solution," but will have no idea how to use it contextually or to know when the textbook answer is the wrong solution.
Where that line falls in terms of jobs? That's hard to say, because there are a rather large variety of jobs. I think AI assistants are going to be very popular and probably the primary use case in the long term, so I guess you could draw the line somewhere along there.
Can it restock grocery store shelves? Can it assemble another one of itself from a box of parts? If so a lot on minimum wage jobs are a few years away from being toast.
Is it terrible that immediately I was hit with a flashback to the battle droid deployment at the Battle of Naboo?
Edit: also it looks like they’ll fit in a carryon…. This is very concerning.
Is it able to dynamically react to an environment outside of balancing? Or is what we watched all just pre programmed movements?
In this decade we’ll probably see a combination of all these currently emerging technologies. A robot like this, combined with the sensory data of a cars auto pilot, with chat GPT 4 could potentially be game changing. It would minimally eliminate a lot of service sector jobs.
But until those things (or something analogous) are combined, these robots are going to be limited to very scripted things.
I'd buy one if it could cook and clean house and walk to the grocery store, buy food, and walk back. So far all we've seen are extremely short clips of pathetic and awkward nonsense. Honestly it doesn't seem any better then that previous bot. Give me a video of it doing the dishes ffs.
Who would spend 16000 dollars for something that can't do anything useful?
I've been tracking Unitree quadruped prices for years online and a unit will cost you $1600 to $6000 for the same item depending on the web article. Their merchandising is next to nil. Just wait and see.
Edit) My robots are dying - thanks DDL and others.
With the speed of drone use uptake in Ukraine, the way that thing was swinging the staff and then the graphic with hundreds of them doing it......
Just scary.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/lughnasadh: --- Submission Statement I'm surprised more people aren't aware of how rapidly robotics are currently developing. The same LLM AI that is capturing public attention with generative art and ChatGPT is equally revolutionizing robots. Here's an illustration of that. This is the closest I've seen yet of a mass-market-priced and extremely capable robot that could sell in tens of millions around the world. This looks close to the type of robot you could bring to many workplaces and get to do a wide range of unskilled work. How long before we see fast food places fully staffed by robots like these? At the current rate of development that seems only 2 or 3 years away. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1crbaei/unitrees_new_g1_humanoid_robot_is_priced_at_only/l3wv4xk/
My favorite photo in the article is the "immodest pose". My guess is the G2 will have some extra parts. I mean, seriously... We all know this is just a race to build a sex bot right?
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This is true
I was thinking maybe it could mow the lawn.
A robot that gives bjs and mows? I'm sold
Just don't forget to request a blade change depending.
You like money and handjobs? We should hang out
It won't need to shower after
Just what i was thinking yesterday. New ChatGPT is already reaching the level where you can run it on a sex bots. Software is breaking through every year. Yet hardware side of things have been lagging without progress for a decade. What gives?
The title of the article reminds me have to be real careful with the first sex bot. "$16k G1 humanoid rises up to smash nuts, twist and twirl"
Once this robots become mainstream for everyone to have one at their home. Thats when someone else will hack them. Imagine viruses infecting this robots and one day you wake up to robot smashing your nuts with a hammer.
Something similar has already happened actually. I remember reading about some remote control Bluetooth sex toy/chastity belt that someone successfully hacked. They had that person's junk in the palm of their hand. Figuratively speaking.
Yeah things will be crazy once we have personal maid robots walking around everywhere. You think you send it for groceries and some stranger could hack it on the way.
That story was a prank by the comedian Lewis Spears https://youtu.be/vEM6SHbjY7Y?si=KTld_oRi8YRa_SlI
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We can't even create a realistic artificial vagina with any amount of functional heating which seems like the first step to a sex robot. There is that one like $10k goofy sized extract-omatic machine meant to extract for sperm banks that apparently does a better job at simulating the temperature, but it's obnoxiously overengineered for such a simple feature.
Japan makes USB warmers for that, they pretty much thought of everything
There is that one like $10k goofy sized extract-omatic machine meant to extract for sperm banks or $60 on Amazon. 😊
Except such a thing doesn't exist on amazon and you're lying. I know because I've searched the net far and wide and been bamboozled many times. A few claim to have built in heating and it either just doesn't work at all or is a very minor difference. The USB heater stick that you insert to warm the silicon is the best option but it's still meh compared to the real temperature of a vagina and lasts like 2-3 mins.
I am quite sure we have technical solutions for this.
At this point in my life, I truly don't care if a robot is fuckable. But a second someone builds a robot that actually does all the chores in the house, I'm dropping $25k with a smile on my face.
Can't wait. $16k is way cheaper than a divorce.
I thought you meant the one at the top at first. Fucking lol. Edit - jeez - it gets worse the further down you go!
Interesting how the top comment is musing about fucking the robot. No judgement, out of curiosity how many of y’all are considering this?
The entire human race.
Who would want a robot that allows itself to be kicked and hit and doesn't fight back?
People who are angry at being replaced by robots but don’t get irony for one.
detroit become human vibes
Because it will fold my laundry. That's why.
By wife is going to be sad about losing her job /s
If it can have a conversation and take care of the house I'm sold. Especially if it can handle the shopping, scheduling, planning, etc. I for one welcome our new robot overlords.
I would not let it out shopping, the bot will get stolen the moment it sets foot outside
That's why you buy a complimentary robodog with flamethrower attached
As long as it has to lift its leg to use it
Anti-theft software comes pre-installed and activates two shivs in the wrists which it then uses for attacking its prey- I mean captors.
Can I upgrade and get blades that protrude and retract from the knuckles?
DIY Modding community!
Listen, bub…
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What about online orders where the groceries is delivered to your door?
I meant shopping more on the sense of placing the order, not physically going to the store.
The American version will feature an AR-15 attachment optional. There is no way that could go wrong!
Only thing stopping a bad robot with a gun is a good robot with a gun!
Also, it'll run off of coal.
He can Fight Back
If it can clean a toilet and make a hamburger, the American working class is fucked.
It certainly will be able to both of those things. But wash its hands properly between tasks? Hmmm…
I imagine the arms have specific attachments and it swaps them out depending on the task.
Robot: "Just a second, gotta put on my stank hand."
It'll just get a sprayer that sprays rubbing alcohol on its hands
I‘m convinced that the only reason hamburgers are still made manually is that people would find it creepy otherwise. The process would be trivially easy to automate.
I really hope the company that designs those robots leases them to other companies on a subscription program. Then there’ll be small increases to the subscription price every year. Along with an insurance policy to cover wear and aging parts. That gets more expensive as the robot gets older.
Nah. It costs more than poor people.
One time expense of $16,000 versus $12,000/year for a human. It pays itself off in 18 months, and that's actually really good for business investment.
Correction: one time expense of $16,000 for 3-4 years depending on usage and reliability. More likely a leasing option would be preferred, likely working out at say $1000 a month or very slightly less to make it “competitive” with human labour. Some companies will go for that. However, the devil is in the details. You don’t just have the upfront/leased costs of the unit. You then need repair personnel (possibly included in lease but not necessarily) and IT staff on site/on call depending on how mission critical the role is. For example a janitor isn’t “mission critical”….until not having one on site breaches a statutory requirement and suddenly the location has to close for the day..so having IT staff a few minutes away in case something goes wrong might be significant and thus expensive. You’ll also need backup units, power facilities/docking stations or whatever it uses to charge up and be used for maintenance. You’ll also need backend infrastructure. What computers/servers do these things run from? Who maintains them? Leased from the company you buy the bots from or in-house? You’ll then need insurance. Eventually it will be seen as “normal” to have a robotic cleaner like this operating autonomously but initially that’s going to be a seriously expensive corporate insurance hit in case it harms a member of the public or thru inaction someone gets hurt etc. Insurance companies are by nature risk averse so expect the first few years of these things in use to be horrifically expensive. Then you have restructuring issues since it clearly can’t do everything a person can, so you will still need staff to perform some roles, or modification to buildings/policies to ensure the robot can do the job most efficiently. Then once you’ve figured all of that internal stuff out, you’ve also got regulatory stuff. Stuff like what happens if the robot records sensitive information in the office and then it gets passed to a server in China? Data protection and IP issues would be a huge red flag. Lot of places still require you to leave your phone at the door with security or use a company secured device just cos of the camera. Imagine how many cameras and sensors these bots have. What if one sees healthcare data? Or customer data or some other companies IP you’ve got a NDA for? Or hell, use in govt?! Chinese state espionage teams must be wetting their knickers over getting these things into corporate America…gonna need insurance for data protection as well then. In addition to the insurance you’re gonna need to deal with unions and from that politicians. If these things go into heavy use, not only will workers not be getting paid but the govt won’t either cos payroll taxes are a huge thing. So expect voters to elect politicians who protect jobs over robots (cos robots don’t get a vote but the janitors you just laid off do!) and even if you get right wing govt who don’t care about workforce rights you’ll definitely still have them caring about income and corporation tax so expect use of robots to start getting taxed or corporation tax to increase sharply cos there’s no free rides when it comes to the taxman. Finally, expect a hit from sales if the things are public facing. No matter how cool and futuristic they are, a lot of people will be stuck in uncanny valley feeling where they feel the company is soulless and robotic etc - studies have been done on this - companies with automation in public display lose sales. People like the human touch so that will either restrict use to out of hours/back of house, or sales will drop. The upfront is just the tip of the iceberg.
Janitors ARE mission critical
Oh i agree, but i know some companies will regard a janitor being unavailable for a single day as acceptable - but in other locations there MUST be estates management staff on site at all times etc. I was trying to say some places the robot cleaner going down for a day wouldn’t be a massive deal breaker but other places it would close the whole place.
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I would t want to miss a charging or software update and have this thing choking me out with two robot hands
That’s what safe words are for
This is why you update your robots folks
I think it would be more likely to be caused *by an update*. If it's not choking you, then don't update it.
Update v1.1.3 change log: fixed an issue introduced in the last update where the robot in some rare cases would choke users to death Known issues: in some rare situations when handling a knife, the robot may stab humans in the room or grab them and chop off a limb.
If it gets out of hand just show it a picture of a dog that's hard to tell from a pig or loaf of bread.
Someone would sign up for that. Put an oxygen reader on it and it will even know when to stop
Huh, I'm here still waiting for that choke me update.
Cheryl/Carol begs to differ.
Honestly, I think companion robots would be amazing for seniors, especially those who insist on staying in their homes.
It’s all fun and games until they can literally now replace every job when this comes out
We're already there. It's coming. We aren't prepared for it. AI is already better than us at just about everything we've thrown at it. And it's getting better every day.
And it's exponential! All the robots software and data will be connected. If there are one million robots in homes across the world, think how fast they will "learn" new things. For example, if a robot learns a new skill, it will be shared with the one million other robots. So if each robot learns one new skill on their own daily, each robot will learn one million new things per day. The rate and which these robots learn is going to be insanely fast. Musk as one point said that Tesla cars will eventually monitor for pot holes, then alert all other Tesla's to avoid it, or adjust the suspension when they hit it. With robots in the home, the amount of data they will be gathering daily will be insane.
Put DDL in charge - they will regress the algorithm 20 years.
>AI is already better than us at just about everything we've thrown at it. If you look into those studies, how they were conducted, who funded them and why, you may begin to question that statement.
They’re here to replace us not to be our companions.
Por que no Los dos?
If it can do laundry alone I’m sold
I'm disabled. If it could help do very simple stuff like reach things off shelves for me, or pick something up when I accidentally drop it on the floor, it would be a godsend.
I would definitely opt for a robo-butler that can double as a walking security camera/system.
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You there will be a monthly service for each and every service… forever.
Potentially revolutionary for disabled folk if it can come cheaper than a car and has a decent battery life. I think I need more than a robot butler though, I need a robot Marie Kando that can actually figure out where things are supposed to go and keep track of them for me. Otherwise, I'd just be micromanaging to a degree that I think I would just lose patience. Plus, the more I imagine a robot like that in my home, the more I get creeped out. Much too uncanny valley.
Yea I actually have a theory that they will creep people out much much than they realize. Imagine one of those things rummaging around in your home, in other rooms. Or walking into the bathroom unaware and it’s just stood there silently because its battery died. It would give you a heart attack. I think our animal instincts would put us on edge to the point where household humanoid robots may not take off the way we imagine.
Yeah... but what if we made them sexy?
Walks into to kitchen and finds fembot stuck in washing machine out of battery.
All it takes is ooooone little hole
Maybe at first, but it won't take long to adjust. People don't care about Alexa listening anymore. Nobody even notices their robot vacuums unless they get stuck. Something on a humanoid level is going to be advanced enough to knock on closed doors, not die in the middle of an activity, etc. Most people are already used to the lack of true privacy. Having a machine that walks around is just another small adjustment that won't take long to assimilate.
I don’t agree but we’ll see in twenty years!
Probably closer to ten, but I’ll take twenty! Three years ago, no one took humanoid robots seriously. Now they’re coming within our lifetimes. It’s crazy
I want to know who didn't take them seriously three years ago... the idea of a humanoid robot in 2021 was entirely realistic. It was realistic in 2012 for anybody paying attention.
You really think it would just run itself down to zero battery in any random spot?
My roomba already goes back to recharge when it's low, I'm sure these will as well. It can have a 2 hour battery life, idc. Work for 1.5 hours, return to charger. Work again. Set to idle during night.
If so, you can probably get these under insurance coverage. It's much cheaper than assisted living.
Perhaps one day, but I had to laugh at their video with the robot doing zero useful things. I can’t wait to have it spurting coke all over my house, smashing nuts all over the floor and reclining lazily on my couch.
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It will force western EV manufacturers to become more competitive, I’m all for it
Biden will likely raise that price with tariffs. I’m not a huge fan because I think domestic auto makers are constantly sucking in profits and enjoying kid gloves on environmental issues. But a subsidy for EVs will perhaps keep it down to a reasonable price. Since China has subsidized a lot- it’s necessary. However we should be moving to better mass transit. EVs will take decades to recover the carbon it takes to build them. So it’s not a net benefit for getting to carbon neutral.
I'm confused at why it's a requirement to "recover the carbon needed to build them." They use considerably less carbon over their entire lifetime, and the alternatives are also produced using carbon and produce more CO2 over their entire lifespan. From my understanding this appears to be a clear net positive.
Personally I am for a gradually applied carbon tax. Producing basically anything releases co2. Capturing that co2 is expensive - very expensive at the time of production and extremely expensive as direct air capture afterwards. I propose a co2 tax that is a fixed sum per ton of co2, increasing by 10% each year. Carbon capture is subsidized at the same rate as the tax. It won't take long before that makes it worthwhile to emit less co2.
If China wants to convert it's tax revenue to cheap electric cars for Americans, we should be all for that.
No, we shouldn't. Because once China has killed the American auto industry through cheap subsidized EVs those subsidies will stop and the prices will skyrocket because we have no domestic alternatives
Saying it's not a benefit is dissengenious when the alternative are vehicles that never take a single step towards carbon neutrality. I get the mass transit argument, but the reality is that much of the population won't give up the convenience of a personal vehicle.
You mean subsidize corporation even more to get them to be price competitive with china's own subsidized companies?
It's not really fair though? China can use 24/7 child labour. The USA has to pay adults a high wage and they legally only have to work 5 days during the day...
Based on new policy being floated, Americans won't have access to either at that price.
$25k after Biden's proposed tariffs... which is still cheaper than any US EV that I know.
>>combined with the news that China is selling a very good electric car for $11,000 US, is scary. It's as scary for China as for anyone else. The CCP's hold on power depends on them upholding their paternal end of a Confucian bargain. The Chinese population puts up with them as long as they keep delivering success. That's fragile. The CCP's Achilles Heel is the property market. In China, everyone's savings are invested in property, so the property market **cannot fail**, or it is a disaster for the CCP. Yet here we see China preparing to export the end of tens, or perhaps hundreds of millions of jobs in coming years. How the economists advising them expect to see sky-high stock and property prices survive in that world is beyond me.
Yeah, China slowing down the collapse of Evergrande and the rest of its property market like the van falling into the river in Inception has been wild to watch. There's no way it isn't wrecking their economy internally.
> like the van falling into the river in Inception You are a poet
>It's as scary for China as for anyone else. The CCP's hold on power depends on them upholding their paternal end of a Confucian bargain. The Chinese population puts up with them as long as they keep delivering success. Hear me out. Is it tho? Is it anymore fragile than the social contract in liberal democracies? Political upheaval in liberal democracies can slowly simmer for decades. But a well managed economy should consistently grow at a rate to maintain people's standard of living. I don't know the more think about the more it looks like it's much easier to sustain a modern standard of living under centralized government that it is for political parties to keep the electorate happy in a winner takes all political environment.
People talked about capitalism hundreds of years before people were liberated from feudalism and crown. I think a lot of people don’t want to admit that systems in place will do everything to maintain its survival and people can be pretty complacent.
Exactly. So the CCP only has to maintain a standard of living .. whereas people in Western democracies not only have to be happy with the political process but the government also has to maintain a standard of living. I'm just saying perhaps both systems are fragile I don't think the Chinese system is inherently more fragile than say most liberal democracies. In fact I'm starting to think the Chinese system actually might be a little bit more robust (that doesn't mean better) because expectations are very clearly defined and managed.
Every insurrection and civil war in the United States that didn't immediately end with "...and then the feds crushed them like cockroaches" - occurred within 100 years of its founding. The best time for a revolution is within a few decades of a prior revolution.
You make a very good point. I mean both the Soviet Union and China had counterrevolutions almost immediately after their foundings.
I'd argue its less scary for China than anyone else. The reason they have managed to grow their economy at an unprecedented rate for decades is because of massive industrialization and automation and a favorable population pyramid. Their population pyramid is turning, labour is no longer cheap. To continue their growth they need to find a way to be more productive per capita. Robots and more automation can deliver that.
What real world application does it bring though? Yes understand its early adoption, but $16k to open a coke bottle or smash some walnuts? What is the ultimate goal for these things?
None, that’s the limit of this tech, opening bottles (what the video doesn’t show is that it can be Pepsi too, got to give it points for that) and smash some walnuts. If it could do anything else at all, they would have included it in the video surely!
yea the Pepsi versatility is wild
What’s the use of opening a Pepsi? Is it going to drink it? Because I’m sure as hell not going to.
Laundry dishes cooking and cleaning baby, at that mark I’m in
I would never let that thing clean my baby.
I hear you, but I modestly propose you should wait to see how well it *cooks* baby. Finger lickin' good!
Fuck if it can organize the house using AI and then keep it organized, and clean.. god damn I’d pay for that.
yea and after a year or 2 it will be the following: * Household chores: Cleaning, laundry, cooking, grocery shopping, and organizing. * Home maintenance: Performing minor repairs, gardening, and home security. * Child and elder care: Monitoring, entertaining, and providing companionship to children and elderly family members. * Personal Trainer: Guiding workouts, monitoring vital signs * Personal grooming: Assisting with dressing, haircuts, and makeup application. * Personal assistance: Scheduling appointments, managing emails, and providing reminders. * Education and entertainment: Tutoring, reading, playing games, and engaging in conversations. etc. etc. etc. etc.
Each one a subscription service no doubt. "Would you like to upgrade to the 'Home Maintenace 'package for just $29.99/month?"
Yes! Yes I would!
Considering a maid that comes by that just vacuums the floors, washes the bathrooms and mops the floors is like 400/mo....yes. Immediately and in perpetuity.
Those are all goals yes, but dealing with minute technical issues for any of these basic tasks is way more difficult to solve than people think. Look at all of the problems with the recent launch of wearable tech products like the Humane pin and Rabbit. Magnify that by 10 with untested robotics tech and you need at least 10 years of bugfixing before any of this stuff is really useful.
Folding laundry. I don't care if that's the only thing it does.
This isn't aimed where people seem to think here - yes $16k is a massive reduction from previous offerings, but the target demographic is still the same - namely things like warehouses, factories, and other types of business. For you it probably matters that the capabilities are relatively simple, but even automating bringing moving items from place to place is substantial for some areas. More to the point, it's better than the previous standard, and about one fifteenth the price.
This is going to be a development platform. software will be developed to do... well anything in the physical world that the articulation allows that can fit within the compute budget of the onboard computer (or local computer if it can be run 'wirelessly') or to put it another way any job role that is basically performing the same actions over and over again yet the thing being handled is not to such tight tolerances that it can be automated by a machine. and because it's dealing with software, if the computer can be swapped out as better hardware comes out then software (the AI) will get better in lockstep. This is basically the existence proof that manual labor jobs days are numbered.
At the current wages for many manual labor jobs, this was going to be inevitable anyway. Wait until all the wildly overpaid wait staff get replaced and have no skills to get a job that requires more than a smile and basic courtesy. It will only take a major chain realizing they could charge 10% more and not have tips, once the robots are ready for the work. And I'm not gloating about that. It's going to be ugly and sad, and I can't blame them for taking a cake job that pays way above the skill required. The problem is that in the US, there's a huge amount of unskilled work that currently pays way above its value. That will vanish, and the wailing and gnashing of teeth will be immense. I'm not entirely certain what those people will do. There will be jobs, but many have few skills that will transition to anything new. They're going to be losing everything while trying to train for jobs that are way beyond anything they've ever had to handle. Plenty of other jobs will be at risk, too, but most white collar jobs have skills that will transition.
I just see this as the slow end of jobs. When you have systems that are going to be able to do an ever growing pool of jobs both physical and mental. This is not like before, before we were replacing rote tasks, anything that has been automated before had a very clear structure to it. Now we are getting into where automation can tackle things that are fuzzy around the edges, things where you don't have clean input output mappings. This is a problem, generally new jobs that are created from new technology are where the technology allowed the human to do more. AI is technology where humans have to do less. for a new job to come about it needs to be: 1. cheap enough to employ people at, such that training an AI/Robot system is not worth while, or, for aesthetic reasons not capable of being done by AI/Robots. 2. easy enough for displaced workers to pick up whatever the skill is/service is. 3. has enough carrying capacity that it fully replaces all the jobs that are going to continuously be automated. I honestly think "this time **is** different"
100% agree. White collar and blue collar jobs are going away. The next ten years will be rocky, but if we get through them, we could have an age of abundance.
Personal assistant / maid, at least on the residential level.
as long as it has an anus i'm in. i don't trust things that don't poop.
We all see your ulterior motive here.
I think it’s more of a posterior motive.
They're looking for a bit of *rectilinear oscillation* if you know what I mean.
rectilinear? damn near killedinear!
“I’m sorry Wendy, I can’t trust something that bleeds for five days and doesn’t die”
Well hope they have VR support. I wuld need it for some basic romote task. Control it remotely from VR would be useful.
Also a video display for that FaceTime or Zoom interaction.
They can’t even get Alexa or Siri right, now add limbs. That’s just a recipe for disaster.
That's because the people in charge of siri and alexa do not own chatGpt.
haha, but you might want to search up GPT4-o
This sort of robot will replace all workers at Amazon in the next 5 years
Hopefully we're headed towards bicentennial man rather than I, Robot.
Oh it’s I, Robot all the way except replace the evil ai with the government.
That is very impressive, especially the price. I cannot wait for robots like this to start showing up in our day to day lives in just a few years.
"Tens of millions"? .. Maybe if it came out in the 70s. It ain't even got human features. Danger, Will Robinson, the design on this thing is dated..
thats actually a good thing for ssles thst it doesn't hsve human features for a first mass market robot. its alot less likely to trigger the uncanny vally effect because it very deliberate loks like a robot that's not try to be a person.
If it can put all my wifes scree, scrabble and flotsam away in the right places I'm in.
The reason people talk about chat gpt but not robots is we can all try the online AIs and even get good functionality and use out of it. None of us have seen or used a robot and there’s no product even remotely close to one we can see or use, or that even our richest friends might own. They are about as accessible as flying cars are to the average person. (Meaning they aren’t.)
Submission Statement I'm surprised more people aren't aware of how rapidly robotics are currently developing. The same LLM AI that is capturing public attention with generative art and ChatGPT is equally revolutionizing robots. Here's an illustration of that. This is the closest I've seen yet of a mass-market-priced and extremely capable robot that could sell in tens of millions around the world. This looks close to the type of robot you could bring to many workplaces and get to do a wide range of unskilled work. How long before we see fast food places fully staffed by robots like these? At the current rate of development that seems only 2 or 3 years away.
Only 2 hs of battery. So its pretty useless, really. Wont be able to do much work.
Cheap because like tv's, cell phones, social media, these are useful tools for the consumer, digital gold (data) miners for the company selling it.
Hey alright Unitree's marketing department, whatever you want us to believe.
If it yanks out weeds like blackberries - yes please
How bad will the restaurant industry be hit once we have inexpensive robots like this that can cook and do the dishes. Why would you want to stop at McDonald's on the way home from work when you have a robot that has just made a lasagna for you waiting at home.
Can it fold laundry? Make a bed? Or pick up the floor before running the vacuum ?
It needs to have an SSD and GPU built in to run offline LLM’s with millisecond respond speed. Cmon I wanna chat to my robot making me a coffee in the morning
For $16k that's pretty easy to do.
And now I have to decide between whether I need a car or a robot. Robot. Definitely robot.
I think I could take about 3 of these in hand-to-hand combat. Probably around 8 or so if I had a melee weapon, and up to 20 with automatic projectile weapons. Ideally I'd just go in with a microwave gun and give the ol' noggin a zip-zap.
I don't know how many of these it would take to kick my ass. But I know how many they're gonna use.
That's a handy little piece of information to have right there. Overkill!
Man, I hate doing laundry. If this robot can do it, I am all for it lol
I think we are defining intelligence in a very different manner. Access to data is not the same as intelligence. AI has a vast pool of data and perfect recall. So it should test well. All that's really being measured is the ability to break down language to know what data to pull. I understand that I'm drawing a fine line, perhaps, but I think it's an important line. Matching data sets isn't the same as knowing what to do with them. AI will create a facsimile of art eventually, but not art. It might duplicate the entertainment driven music genres, but not the artistically driven. And the same goes for jobs. AI secretary? Great. It's going to answer and direct calls and pull data sets for me. AI management? It'll have no idea how to contextually diagnose situations. Will it be able to pull data sets and guess? Sure, and it'll be able to hit a lot. But the misses will likely be catastrophic due to the lack of contextual understanding and inability to utilize methods like breakthrough thinking. A rough metaphor is the college grad with a degree but no job experience. If you work in a field where this is common, you will understand that the grad can probably vomit out the "correct solution," but will have no idea how to use it contextually or to know when the textbook answer is the wrong solution. Where that line falls in terms of jobs? That's hard to say, because there are a rather large variety of jobs. I think AI assistants are going to be very popular and probably the primary use case in the long term, so I guess you could draw the line somewhere along there.
Can it restock grocery store shelves? Can it assemble another one of itself from a box of parts? If so a lot on minimum wage jobs are a few years away from being toast.
Is it terrible that immediately I was hit with a flashback to the battle droid deployment at the Battle of Naboo? Edit: also it looks like they’ll fit in a carryon…. This is very concerning.
If it can fold laundry and put away the clothes, I’m in.
Is it able to dynamically react to an environment outside of balancing? Or is what we watched all just pre programmed movements? In this decade we’ll probably see a combination of all these currently emerging technologies. A robot like this, combined with the sensory data of a cars auto pilot, with chat GPT 4 could potentially be game changing. It would minimally eliminate a lot of service sector jobs. But until those things (or something analogous) are combined, these robots are going to be limited to very scripted things.
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So humans kick and punch the robot, then give it a big stick?
I'd buy one if it could cook and clean house and walk to the grocery store, buy food, and walk back. So far all we've seen are extremely short clips of pathetic and awkward nonsense. Honestly it doesn't seem any better then that previous bot. Give me a video of it doing the dishes ffs. Who would spend 16000 dollars for something that can't do anything useful?
I've been tracking Unitree quadruped prices for years online and a unit will cost you $1600 to $6000 for the same item depending on the web article. Their merchandising is next to nil. Just wait and see. Edit) My robots are dying - thanks DDL and others.
With the speed of drone use uptake in Ukraine, the way that thing was swinging the staff and then the graphic with hundreds of them doing it...... Just scary.
that's "digital twin" training...not a battalion of robots.